Street Fight Daily: Google Kills Offers, Foursquare Reveals Revenues

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology

Google Shuts Down Self Serve Offers Product (Blumenthals)
Google announced this afternoon that they will be shutting down their Places Dashboard self-serve Offers product. Google Coupons had been the Rodney Dangerfield of Google local products, always hidden, never talked about and for years, after anoptimistic start in 2006, they languished.

New Patch Owner Hale Plans to Run Company in ‘Lean, Entrepreneurial Mode (Street Fight)
“There are lots of potential models, and there’s no reason to be ideological about finding the right match between models and communities,” says Hale. “The best thing for hyperlocal journalism is a sustainable business model.”

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, Rebuffing Sale Offers, Says Revenues Grew 500% in Q1 2014, 600% In 2013 (TechCrunch)
Foursquar is fast approaching its fifth birthday and CEO Dennis Crowley wants us to know that it’s still growing — in revenues at least. Speaking on CNBC alongside Foursquare investor Ben Horowitz, he said that revenues at his startup grew 600% in 2013, and in the first quarter of 2014, they were on track to be up by 500% compared to Q1 of 2013.

In the Age of Big Data, Sometimes a Phone Call Still Works Best (Street Fight)
More and more, marketers are turning to deep data analytics to measure the impact relative to a local marketing campaign. But call measurement provider Telmetrics says that value can still be delivered by paying attention to a more basic form of interaction: phone calls.

Short-term Profit Taking vs. Long-term Value Creation: The Future of PayPal (LinkedIn)
Reid Hoffman: While Icahn mentions long-term shareholder value no less than seven times in his letter, his perspective on PayPal seemed far more focused on the short term. The reality of Silicon Valley is that innovation takes time. The fabled Eureka moments may lead to product breakthroughs, but they rarely lead to fully formed products, and they never lead to mature and fully formed businesses.

Facebook’s Graph Search: One Year Later (Guardian)
Introducing Graph Search in March 2013, Facebook created a powerful engine that generates results based on exactly what users want to see. On launching, the feature certainly had the potential to transform the digital advertising space and take on some of the search engine giants such as Google, Yahoo! and Yelp, but one year on, how is it faring?

Jack Dorsey-backed Peek raises $5M, plans Latin America launch for 2014 (VentureBeat)
Peek wants to be the Open Table of events and tours. It just raised $5 million from investors like StubHub cofounder Jeff Fluhr and Orbitz board member Brad Gerstner to make that happen. Peek launched in 2012 with investments from tech celebrities Jack Dorsey and Eric Schmidt to target both the local and tourism market.

Beyond Google: The Fragmented World Of Mobile Search Marketing (MediaPost)
Google commands the largest share of mobile search volume of any single publisher, but it may surprise you that recent surveysof tablet and mobile users have found that nearly half of consumers use apps for local business searches. Here are three of the largest non-Google, non-Bing sources of mobile search for local business — and why they’re important for search marketers to consider.

A Look At The iBeacon Store Of The Future With Retail Startup Thirdshelf (TechCrunch)
Tt this year’s Dx3 digital business expo, Montreal-based Thirdshelf had a fully functional demonstration retail store with iBeacon proximity based shopper customization in place. The demo store makes real a lot of what you may have heard about the potential of this tech, using Thirdshelf’s whitelabel in-store app and Estimote’s Bluetooth LE-powered hardware beacons.

Clinkle Hires ex-Twitter Principal Designer to Lead Its Design Team (GigaOm)
Mobile wallet startup Clinkle still hasn’t publicly revealed how it plans to turn the mobile payments market on its ear, but it’s certainly taking advantage of the attention from a $25 million seed to recruit some exceptional talent. Former Twitter Principal Designer Josh Brewer is joining Clinkle as VP of Design.